The disappearance of Nature Writing
I was talking with a friend of mine just now. He had come back from his trip to Ladakh, a beautiful land in Northern India that touches into Tibet. I have never been to Ladakh but if pictures are able to capture a sliver of the majesty that land possesses, I am remiss that I have never been able to see it.
I told him that I was jealous that he got to visit and live in such a place for a significant amount of time. He said that the land was as beautiful as the pictures can intimate and as freeing as one would want it to be and that we should visit when I am back in India. He then brought up a travel writer who wrote of Ladakh and Tibet with such a vivid force that my friend was enchanted by.
We then discussed how incredibly rare or vestigial nature writing - or writing as a way to describe Nature and Places - has become. We are all carrying with us a piece of instrument that can precisely capture everything that we may want to see again but back in the day, the only way to serve your memory into remembering how a place looked was to rely on one's words or art. Both of which we do less of nowadays. Or at least it seems that way to me on an unrefined first pass.
What have we lost with that art? Perhaps we may have lost the ability to see. Perhaps we have lost the ability to describe what we see. When we look at a sunset, and we think of it as beautiful, we take out our phones and snap a picture. We then show it to our friends in turn - and they think of it as beautiful. But notice that we never take the time to ponder where we find the beauty. Whether it's in the roundness of the sun that slowly penetrates into the horizon. Whether it's the wavy hue of orange and red mixing with the blue and black of the sky. Again, notice how we rarely take the time to describe what we saw in our words to our friends. We instead show them the picture we took.
A picture speaks a thousand words, as the saying goes, and it is indeed true. But the danger with that we may forsake our thousand words for a common thousand words.
Colophon: Written in a quick burst of writing to preserve the ideas when the tracks of it in my mind have not disappeared.